on being from "the 305"

I saw a friend this past Sunday. I had not seen her in more than twenty years.  We are members of an organization we joined as undergraduates. In her characteristically loving and funny way, she announced how we were both from “the 305” (i.e. area code 305, which is to say, Miami, the city; not 205, Tuscaloosa, a place that is not entirely the country, but certainly not Miami). She took it one step further and said we were from the Baa Haas, a particular neighborhood in the county in which Miami sits. As I said in an earlier blog entry, to live in the Baa Haas (pronounced BAH-hahs) once upon a time was to live amid sand dunes and with an increasingly African American middle class population. It is the kind of population about which many, even African Americans, make assumptions, some warranted, some not. I wonder now if the assumptions have something to do with a fundamental human need to organize ourselves and others. In other words, we feel compelled to decide where we fit into the big scheme of things, but to do so, we must decide where others fit in.  I am sure there are theories out there on this. For now, the words from one Gullah young woman in the 1991 “Daughters of the Dust,” the motion picture used in class this week, suffice. “Who they out there,” she said, making clear the degree to which place defines people, but also how people define place.